what, you totally can!

Kind of.

Hey everyone, Laci Green here and this is Dnews.

Time is a fixed dimension. One second for me is one second for you.

But even though one second is fixed, how we experience it and perceive it can vary hugely.

And that's because our brains aren't just keeping track of time, watching it go by,

our brains are actively constructing time - creating time. I know, "Whoa dude that's

so crazy!"

That tidbit comes from David Eagleman, a neuroscientist and director of the Eagleman Laboratory for

Time and Perception.

He says he became fascinated with time when as a child he fell off a roof. And he kept

falling, and falling, and falling.

And in those moments, it felt like time had completely slowed down. Mid-air he thought

to himself, "This is what Alice must have felt like falling down the rabbit hole."

There are a few things that we know about our mind's perception of time. Unlike our

senses like touch and taste, time doesn't have a specific part in the brain that controls

the perception of it.

Time comes down to a whole complex network of areas within the brain.

We also know that when we're in a life threatening situation, time seems to slow down. And as

we get older, time seems to speed up.

Neuroscientist have pieced together why this is so. The more information your brain has

to process, the slower time seems. When you're in a life threatening situation, all of your

brain's resources have become intensely focused on survival.

You're paying really close attention. The more attention to detail there is, the longer

time seems to last because all of that information takes longer for your brain to process.

On the flipside, time goes faster when you don't have much information to process. If

you're not taking in much that's new, your brain is on autopilot.

Less resources required, and time feels faster.

This explains why time seems to get faster as we get older. As you age, there isn't as

much new information for your brain to take in, which creates shortcuts in your brain.

Ok. Cool. So what about when time goes really slow when you're bored?

A study in the Journal of Consumer Psychology found that without enough stimulation, the

brain concentrates its resources on monitoring the time. You're like, "Come on, tick tock."

And because it consumes your brain, you perceive it as slower.

On the flipside, a study published by The Association For Psychological Science found

that people don't actually perceive time as shorter when they're having fun.

But people did report more enjoyment when they were lied to and told the task they performed

took half the time than they actually took.

So what this all means is that we do have some control over our perception of time.

We can make it seem faster by finding ways to distract ourselves from the passage of

time, and we can slow it down when things seem too fast, by giving our brains lots of

new things to process.

Continuing to learn new things and chewing on new ideas and immersing yourself in new

environments.

So, there you go time benders. Go do your thing. I'll see you next time with more Dnews.

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